Thursday, August 25, 2016

Jurors' comments

The quilt
that I had sent to Festival of Quilts this year is the quilt on migration which
I made late last year. It did not get accepted intoSAQA’s “Stories of
Migration” show, it did not fit the size restrictions for SAQA Europe/Middle East
exhibition “Wide Horizons V”, I once again missed the entry deadline for
European Art Quilts that I wanted to have it entered into – and it did not get
accepted for the Fine Art Masters at Festival of Quilts. By then I was thinking
that probably this wasn’t a good quilt after all, despite (or perhaps because
of?) the strong emotional attachment that I felt towards this quilt.

I had
written up a bit about how it came to be for the QGBI Contemporary Group
newsletter in the spring. Because of the limitation of pages in the
publication, the original text was edited and several sections had to be cut
out. This is the entire text how I had first sent it in:

The refugee
crisis and my art

For years
it has been on my mind that many people live in war-like conditions, face
famine or drought, and finally decide to pack up and go. They leave their home
and familiar environment behind and embark on a risky journey in search of
better living conditions in one of the richer countries. In my own life
experience, going abroad has always been an exciting time. I’ve been privileged
in that I met wonderful people from other countries - some of my best friends
live in far away places - and it is always a wonderful opportunity to have a
bit of an adventure to go and see them. I have left home behind on an exchange
trip or for travels, which means I always knew when I would be returning, and I
never had to worry about relatives and friends whom I left behind because they
were living in safe conditions.

The more it
has been worrying me that millions of other people do not have the opportunity
to live their lives in as easy and comfortable a situation as I can. That’s how
it started that the refugee crisis demanded it appear in my art.

When the
European Patchwork Meetings (now renamed as Carrefour Patchwork Européenne)
announced the theme of “Imagine” for their challenge a couple of years ago, I
juxtaposed the popular song lyrics by John Lennon with a poem by German poet
Bertold Brecht, which also starts with a line that is a call to imagine some
situation.

A year
later, a first group of refugees from various countries, came to our city. They
were mostly from Syria, some
from Afghanistan
and a few West African countries, and I was excited because I thought they
introduced a bit of international flair to our rather remote and rural town. In
the end of January 2015 I started working with a volunteer network, helping the
refugees with applications, doctor appointments, or when they had to go to
their interviews in the process of asking for political asylum. I learned very
quickly that their international experience differed strongly from any
international experience I had had. They were not here on an exchange
programme, they were not excited about meeting people from other countries, nor
were they curious for new experiences. Many of them just wanted to be left in
peace, very few of them had any realistic idea about the kind of country they
had come to, and especially the Syrians basically wanted to continue living the
way they had been living at home. Men don’t take well to having to deal with
women in situations of authority, or they are suspicious about buying meat from
a German butcher because it could have been cut with a knife that had also
touched pork at an earlier stage.

I taught
German to some of them, but many had never had to learn a foreign language
before, perhaps had not even been to school for more than a couple of years.
The Syrians do not like the Africans, and often they are distrustful of one
another, not knowing on which side of the war the others had been involved in
back home.

By the time
of my increasing involvement many people had drowned in terrible boat
calamities in the Mediterranean, and news of
hundreds of victims through capsizing boats began to haunt me. When SAQA
announced a call for entry for an exhibition “Stories of Migration” I wanted to
enter a piece on that topic.

At first I
thought I would use some details of the flight of one of the Syrians whom I had
got to be friends with. The amount of dollars spent on paying for the refugee
smugglers could have been part of the story, the number of attempts needed to
cross from Turkey
to a Greek island, the duration of the trip in a small and unsafe boat. But I
hesitated, as I did not want to draw on an individual’s personal story, using
it for my work. Eventually I decided on an abstracted photograph of one boat in
the Mediterranean, taken at the moment when
helpers were approaching in the dark, and the boat was about to capsize.

The original photo from the internet -

and what a bit of photoshopping did to it.

I overlaid
this abstracted background with a dictionary definition of terms regarding
‘migration’ from my monolingual English dictionary.

The quilt,
obviously, is not a happy quilt, and it was not chosen as part of the
exhibition. But it drew quite a bit of attention in a small exhibition of my
work here in my home town.

Working
with the refugees has been one of the most intense and challenging years of my
life, and it has definitely affected my art, as two other quilts on that topic
of migration in/to Europe followed after this
one. Meeting these people has made me a much more politically aware and active
person than I had ever been before, although I had never considered myself
apolitical. But it has also gone beyond my strength, and recently I had to reduce
my involvement because I was bordering on the brink of burn out. I still
strongly believe in the necessity to maintain a civil right for political
asylum. But as Germany
is struggling with the influx of more and more refugees, political extremism is
rising and the European Union seems to be on the brink of breaking apart at the
moment, I am consciously not planning on making more quilts related to that
topic. For a while at least.

By the time
the quilt had benn rejected from the Fine Art Masters I was getting to be pretty convinced
that this was not a good quilt. Yet I wanted to give it another chance and sent
it to the open categories, as a “Contemporary”, and this is how it had been hung.

I was also
brave enough to ask for judge’s comments to be sent back with the quilt.

When it
came back a few days after the show closed, I then was even braver enough to
open the envelope and read what they had written. (I’ve had an earlier
experience when judge’s comments seemed so belittling and devaluating that I
had actually thought I would never again ask for judge’s comments from FoQ.)

Two were
very positive. One read: “Inspiring design, solours of quilting threads go very
well with the fabrics,”, and the other said “A strong piece. I like that I can
read the writing easily. I also like to see social comment.”

And the
‘grades’ weren’t bad, either. Mostly ‘excellent’ and ‘good’.

Except for
the two “Satisfactory” from the third judge for “quilting: design &
execution” and “edges: suitable finish, hangs well.” This person also wanted it
to be more quilted: “Topical, thoughtful and sensitive quilt. May benefit from
more quilting. Well done!”

This is a
backside view of the quilt.

Capsized (text messages 8)

Where would
more quilting fit in, and how would the quilt benefit from that, I just wonder?
But it came back safe and sound, and although it did not win a prize or get a
recommendation, I now think that it’s not only my personal involvement with the
whole issue – it’s not a bad quilt at all.

2 comments:

I didn't have the chance to say to you that I was so glad I got to see this in person. The words really helped to say something that connected with anyone who saw or was moved by seeing the situation of the migrants/asylum seekers. I think even if the words were in another language, having them there really told the story more vividly. I think it is a brilliant quilt. Perhaps you should enter Layered Voices. Since the other venue was looking for large work and installations, it could very well be that this is the place for the quilt to be seen.And no, it is Not a bad quilt at all!Sandy